Fuddland
As well as enjoying the delicious dishes, we played a few non-drinking games at my leaving dinner.
- Don’t guess the number
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Person X [secretly] writes down a number between 1 and 100 [not inclusive]. The players take it in turns to guess what the number is—or rather, what it isn’t. After each guess, if it isn’t the number on the paper, the guessing range is narrowed by whatever the most recent guess was.
For example, suppose the number to guess is 76. Player A [wrongly] guesses 23. Now the guessing range is narrowed to between 23 and 100. Player B guesses 87, so now the range is 23 to 87. And so on, until someone lands on 76 and has to perform a forfeit. [In our case, the forfeit was eating one of the hot chillies.]
Handy hint: Chinese people are quite superstitious about their numbers so if you want the round to be over quickly, write down the lucky 8 or 88. If you want it to last for a long time, write 4, 14 or 44, all of which would be considered unlucky.
- Lip-reading
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A variation on the Telephone Game [which is the less offensive name for what the British call Chinese Whispers]. The first person thinks of a word or phrase and mouths it to the person next to them, without the other players being allowed to see. They are only allowed to mouth it twice. The phrase gets passed around the circle until the last player says what he/she thinks it is.
This game is probably quite boring in English, but since Chinese is a tonal language, it is a lot harder to read what is being said from the shape of the mouth alone. When it was my turn, I started with “tiger”, which morphed into “rat” along the way and finally emerged as “teacher”.
